Part I

September

Chapter I

A MILD September afternoon, thirty years ago, in the middle of Galway
Bay.

Clouds over the whole expanse of sky, nowhere showing any immediate
disposition to fall as rain, yet nowhere allowing the sky to appear decidedly,
nowhere even becoming themselves decided, keeping everywhere a broad indefinable
wash of greyness, a grey so dim, uniform, and all-pervasive, that it defied
observation, floating and melting away into a dimly blotted horizon, an
horizon which, whether at any given point to call sea or sky, land or water,
it was all but impossible to decide.

Here and there in that wide cloud-covered sweep of sky a sort of break
or window occurred, and through this break or window long shafts of sunlight
fell in a cold and chastened drizzle, now upon the bluish levels of crestless
waves, now upon the bleak untrodden corner of some portion of the coast
of Clare, tilted perpendicularly upwards; now perhaps again upon that low
line of islands which breaks the outermost curve of the bay of Galway,
and beyond which is nothing, nothing, that is to say, but the Atlantic,
a region which, despite the ploughing of innumerable keels, is still given
up by the dwellers of those islands to a mystic condition of things unknown
to geographers, but too deeply rooted in their consciousness to yield to
any mere reports from without.

One of these momentary shafts of light had just caught in its passage
upon the sails of a fishing smack or hooker, Con O'Malley's hooker, from
the middle isle of Aran. It was an old, battered, much-enduring sail of
indeterminate hue, inclining to coffee colour, and patched towards the
top with a large patch of a different shade and much newer material. The
hooker itself was old, too, and patched, but still seaworthy, and, as the
only hooker at that time belonging to the islands, a source, as all Inishmaan
knew, of unspeakable pride and satisfaction to its owner.

At present its only occupants were Con himself and his little eleven-year-old
daughter, Grania. There was, however, a smaller boat belonging to it a
few yards away, which had been detached a short while before for the convenience
of fishing. The occupants of this smaller boat were two also, a lad of
about fourteen, well grown, light haired, fairly well to do, despite the
raggedness of his clothes, which in Ireland is no especial test of poverty.
The other was a man of about twenty-eight or thirty, the raggedness of
whose clothes was of the absolute rather than comparative order. The face,
too, above the rags was rather wilder, more unsettled, more restless than
even West Connaught recognises as customary or becoming. Nay, if you chose
to consider it critically, you might have called it a dangerous face, not
ugly, handsome rather, as far as the features went, and lit by a pair of
eyes so dark as to be almost black, but with a restlessly moving lower
jay, a quantity of hair raked into a tangled mass over an excessively low
brow, and the eyes themselves were sombre, furtive, menacing—the eyes of
a wolf or other beast of prey—eyes which by moments seemed to flash upon
you like something sinister seen suddenly at dead of night. Shan Daly,
or Shan-à-vehonee—'Shan the vagabond'—he was commonly called by his neighbours,
and he certainly looked the character.

Even this man 's fashion of fishing had something in it of the same
furtive and predatory character. Fishing, no doubt, is a predatory pursuit;
still, if any predatory pursuit can be said to be legalised or sanctified,
it surely is. Shan Daly's manner of fishing, however, carried no biblical
suggestions with it. Every time his line neared the surface with a fish
attached, he clutched at it with a sudden clawing gesture, expressive of
fierce, hungry desire, his lips moving, his eyes glittering, his whole
face working. Even when the fish had been cleared from the line and lay
in a scaly heap at the bottom of the boat, his looks still followed them
with the same peculiarly hungry expression. Watching him at such a moment
you would hardly have been surprised had you seen him suddenly begin to
devour them, then and there, scales and all, as an otter might have done.

For more than an hour the light western breeze which had carried the
hooker so rapidly to Ballyvaughan that morning, with its load of kelp,
had been gradually dying away, until now it was all but gone. Far and wide,
too, not a sign of its revival appeared. Schools of gulls rose and dipped
in circles here and there upon the surface of the water, their screams,
now harsh and ear-piercing, now faint and rendered almost inaudible by
distance. A few other fishing boats lay becalmed at widely separated points
in the broad circumference, and, where the two lines of coast, converging
rapidly towards one another, met at Galway, a big merchantman was seen
slowly moving into harbour in the wake of a small tug, the trail of whose
smoke lay behind it, a long coal-black thread upon the satiny surface.

Leaning against the taffrail of, his vessel. Con O'Malley puffed lazily
at his pipe, and watched the smoke disappearing in thin concentric circles,
his brawny shoulders, already bent, less from age than from. an inveterate
habit of slouching and leaning, showing massively against that watery background.
Opposite, at the further end of the boat, the little red-petticoated figure
of his daughter sat perched upon the top of a heap of loose stones, which
served for the moment as ballast. The day, as has been said, was calm,
but the Atlantic is never an absolutely passive object. Every now and then
a slow sleepy swell would come and lift the boat upon its shoulders, up
one long green watery slope and down another, setting the heap of stones
rolling and grinding one against the other. Whenever this happened the
little figure upon the ballast would get temporarily dislodged from its
perch, and sent rolling, now to one side, now to the other, according as
the boat moved, or the loose freight shifted its position. The next moment,
however, with a quick scrambling action, like that of some small marmoset
or squirrel, it would have clambered up again to its former place; its
feet would have wedged themselves securely into a new position against
the stones, the small mouth opening to display a row of white teeth with
a laugh of triumphant glee at its own achievement.

A wild little face, and a wild little figure! Bare-headed. with unkempt
hair tossing in a brown mane over face and neck; a short red flannel petticoat
barely reaching to the knees; another, a whitish one, tied by the strings
cloak-fashion about the shoulders, and tumbling backwards with every movement.
One thing would probably have struck a stranger as incongruous, and that
was the small feet and legs were not, as might have been expected, bare,
but clad in comfortable thick knitted stockings, with shoes, or rather
sandals of the kind known as pampooties, made of cow's skin, tine
hair being left on, the upper portion sewn together and tied with a wisp
of wool in more or less classical fashion across the two small insteps.

Seen against that indeterminate welter of sea and sky, the little brown
face with its rapidly moving glances, strongly marked brows, vividly tinted
colouring, might have brought southern suggestions to your mind. Small
Italian faces have something of that same outline, that flash, that vividness
of colouring: gipsies too. Could the child by any chance, you might have
asked yourself, be a gipsy? But no: a moment's reflection would have told
you it was impossible, for there are no gipsies, never have been any, in
Ireland.

Of course, the real explanation would soon have presented itself to
your mind. It lay in that long-unrenewed, but still-to-be-distinguished
streak of Spanish blood, which comes out, generation after generation,
in so many a West Irish face, a legacy from the days when, to all intents
and purposes, yonder little town was a beleaguered fortress, dependent
for daily necessities upon its boats and the shifting caprice of the seas;
the land-ways between it and the rest of the island being as impracticable
for all ordinary purposes and ordinary travellers as any similar extent
of mid-Africa to-day.

Hours pass unobserved in occupations which are thoroughly congenial
to our temperaments, and it would have been difficult to hit upon one more
congenial to such a temperament as Con O'Malley's than that in which he
was at that moment engaged. Had wind, sky, and other conditions continued
unchanged, he would in all probability have maintained the same attitude,
smoked his pipe with the same passive enjoyment, watched the horizon with
the same vaguely scrutinising air, till darkness drove him home to supper
and Inishmaan. An interruption, however, came, as interruptions are apt
to come when they are least wanted. The fishing that afternoon had been
unusually good, and for a long time past the two occupants of the smaller
boat had been too busily occupied pulling in their lines to have time for
anything else. It was plain, however, that strict harmony was not reigning
there. Now and then a smothered ejaculation might have been heard from
the elder of the two fishermen directed against some proceeding on the
part of the younger one. Presently this would die away, and silence again
set in, broken only by the movements of the fishers, the whisper of the
water, the far-off cries of the gulls, and the dull sleepy croak with which
the old hooker responded to the swell, which, lifting it upon its shoulders
up one smooth grey incline, let it drop down again with a stealthy rocking
motion the next moment upon the other.

Suddenly a loud burst of noise broke from the curragh. It was less like
the anger of a human being than like the violent jabbering, the harsh,
inarticulate cries of some infuriated ape. Harsher and harsher, louder
and louder still it grew, till the discord seemed to fill the whole hitherto
peace- enveloped scene; the very gulls wheeling overhead sweeping away
in wider circles as the clamour reached their ears.

Con O'Malley roused himself, lifted his gaze from the horizon, took
the pipe out of his mouth, and, standing erect, flung an angry glance at
the curragh, which was only separated from his own boat by some twenty
or thirty yards of water.

Evidently a furious quarrel was raging there. The two fishermen, a minute
ago, defined, as everything else, large or small, was defined against that
grey, luminous background of water, were now tumbled together into an indistinguishable
heap, rolling, kicking, struggling at the bottom of the boat. Now a foot
or hand, now a head, rose above the confusion, as one or other of the combatants
came uppermost; then the struggle grew hot and desperate, and the fragile
craft rocked from side to side, but nothing was to be seen of either of
them.

Suddenly Shan Daly's face appeared. It was convulsed with rage; fury
and a sort of wild triumph shone in his black eyes; one skinny arm, from
which the ragged sleeve had fallen back, rose, brown, naked, and sinewy,
over the edge of the boat. He had pinned the boy, Murdough Blake, down
with his left hand, and with the other was now feeling round, evidently
for something to strike him with. Before he could do so, however, Con O'Malley
interfered.

There was an instant silence. Shan Daly drew back, showing a very ugly
face—a face spotted green and yellow with passion, teeth gleaming whitely,
rage and the desire of vengeance struggling in every line of it. He stared
at his interlocutor wildly for a minute, as if hardly realising who he
was or what he was being asked, his mouth moving as if he was about to
speak, but not a word escaping from his lips. In the mean time, the boy
had shaken himself free, had got upon his feet, and now proceeded to explain
the cause of the quarrel. His face was red with the prolonged struggle,
his clothes torn, there was a bad bleeding bruise upon the back of one
of his hands, but though he breathed hard, and was evidently excited, it
was with a volubility quite remarkable under the circumstances that he
proceeded to explain the matter in hand. Shan Daly, he said, had quarrelled
with him about the fish. The fish would roll together whenever the boat
moved, so that the two heaps, his and Shan's, got mixed. Could he, Murdough
Blake, help their rolling? No: God knew that he could not help it. Yet
Shan Daly had sworn to have his blood if he didn't keep them apart. How
was he to keep them apart? It was all the fault of the fish themselves!
Yes, it was ! So it was! He had done his best to keep them apart, but the
fish were slimy and they ran together. Did he make them slimy? No, he did
not ! It was God Himself who had made them slimy. But Shan Daly . . . .

How much longer he would have gone on it is difficult to say, but at
this point his explanations were cut summarily short.

The smaller boat was then pushed up to the other and the boy obeyed.
No sooner was he upon the deck of the larger vessel than Con O'Malley silently
descended into the curragh. The two boats were again pushed a few yards
apart, and Murdough Blake found himself left behind upon the hooker.